Forms of Virtual Patients
Virtual patients may take a number of different forms:
- Artificial patients: computer simulations of biochemical processes such as the effect of drugs in organisms, the physiologic processes of a given organ or entire systems (systems biology) in a given organism. These can be used in different phases of a compound or drug in development in a given pharmacological research as a preliminary to testing on animals and humans for the drug development processes.
- Real patients: reflected in data e.g. electronic health records (EHRs). In this case the virtual patient is the reflection of the real patient in terms of data held about them. These are sometimes called e-patients.
- Physical simulators: mannequins (sometimes spelled 'manikins'), models or related artefacts.
- Simulated patients: where the patient is recreated by humans or computer-generated characters and Virtual Humans acting as such or engaging in other kinds of role-play.
- Electronic case-studies and scenarios where users work through problems, situations or similar narrative-based activities.
Read more about this topic: Virtual Patient
Famous quotes containing the words forms of, forms, virtual and/or patients:
“Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.”
—Michel Foucault (1926–1984)
“I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“Neither dead nor alive, the hostage is suspended by an incalculable outcome. It is not his destiny that awaits for him, nor his own death, but anonymous chance, which can only seem to him something absolutely arbitrary.... He is in a state of radical emergency, of virtual extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)